It’s a great time to be a fan of sci-fi-fantasy author N.K. Jemisin. Her latest book, The Stone Sky, just came out this week. The previous novel in her Broken Earth series, The Obelisk Gate, won a Hugo last week. And the first book in the series, The Fifth Season (which won the 2016 Hugo), is being adapted into a TV series.
Detail from The Fifth Season cover. Image: nkjemisin.com
Deadline reports that TNT is developing the series with producer and writer Leigh Dana Jackson (24: Legacy; Sleepy Hollow; Helix), who helped get the rights to The Stone Sky even before it got its Hugo nomination; its eventual win for Best Novel made Jemisin the first black writer to win in that category. (Now she’s the second, and… well, a three-peat next year seems entirely possible.)
According to Deadline, Jackson will write the script for the proposed drama series, which has a lot of material to draw from:
The Fifth Season is described as an epic drama set in a world where civilisation-destroying earthquakes occur with deadly regularity. A small minority of inhabitants has the ability to quiet these earthquakes, but they can also cause them. The series follows three women, each of whom possesses these special, earth-controlling abilities: Damaya, a young girl training to serve the Empire; Syenite, an ambitious young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor; and Essun, a mother searching for the husband who murdered her young son and kidnapped her daughter mere hours after a Season tore a fiery rift across the land.
Jemisin was understandably thrilled to spread the word on Twitter:
OhdearGodIthoughtIwasgonnablowagasketholdingthisin. Big news re THE FIFTH SEASON! https://t.co/FslJC4OrpM
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) August 16, 2017
If the show’s a hit, quite obviously there are two more critically-acclaimed books that could continue the story for multiple seasons, spin-offs, movies, and everything in between. TNT’s current slate of genre shows includes The Librarians and The Last Ship, as well as a seemingly endless array of Supernatural reruns.